"A commercial ZFS solution is (still) coming to Mac OS X, thanks to former Apple filesystem and OS engineer Don Brady (who previously worked on the abandoned internal Apple project to port ZFS). Brady and his company, Ten's Complement, just launched a limited private beta in hopes to have the software polished and ready for a summer launch this year. Ars spoke with Brady, who has a long history engineering filesystems for Mac OS and Mac OS X, to find out a little about his previous work with ZFS at Apple, and what Mac users can expect to gain from Ten's Complement's port of ZFS."

Will not, but I will point out that someone running a server is not looking for simplified uis. Apple isn't any better than others when it comes to highly complex interfaces.

Either he is using windows and expects the interface to be loaded with all functions so he isn't forced to go into the command line. Or, he is a unix admin that has to be very comfortable using the command line. Apples usual interface choices don't fit either profile...

"Hopefully Apple will ease up and allow some sort of licensing arrangement for OS X Server to run on non Apple servers (seeing as they now have none).

Why would they need to? Since OS X Server is basically all of the F/OSS software with a pretty front end... "

Sadly, this is not *completely* true. OSX doesn't update their F/OSS very often. Its really outdated ( full of security holes and other nastys), and there really is a lot of F/OSS software not available outside of darwin ports or fink ( which means all of the pretty front end stuff doesn't work with it). It might be a good replacement for an internal small business server that doesn't need exchange, sharepoint, active directory, or anything else MS specific. As long as it only needs the F/OSS that Macs come with.

"Hopefully Apple will ease up and allow some sort of licensing arrangement for OS X Server to run on non Apple servers (seeing as they now have none).

Why would they need to? Since OS X Server is basically all of the F/OSS software with a pretty front end... "

Well my only thoughts about this is,

- How would I apply MCX settings to Mac clients?
- How would I set up NetInstall for Mac clients?
- How would I save bandwidth for all Mac clients for software updates.

It might be F/OSS setting up, ftp, email, web server, etc. But Apple did do some specific things for their software platform.

To the person, you quoted. It would be great if they allowed it and specifically virtualised OSX server. Currently you are allowed to Virtualise OSX server, but as long as the VM is running on Apple hardware. Well that server hardware is going away. After all Apple is soft..hardwa..gadgets.. company.

Softwareupdates might be impossible to implement directly, although it's basically an Apache 1.3 with a cgi script querying Apple's servers for software updates, caching these locally and allowing clients to browse its catalogs via http.

A clever proxy setup might be able to cache files on a separate server so that every update only needs to be downloaded once; the next client asking for this file at Apple's swupd.apple.com would get the local cached version instead.

- How would I apply MCX settings to Mac clients?
- How would I set up NetInstall for Mac clients?
- How would I save bandwidth for all Mac clients for software updates.

MCX can be applied via AD if needed. Of course this means adding to the AD schema and lots of corporate AD teams love that. You also need workgroup manager (or whatever the tool is called) to set the options, unless your happy to work without a GUI.

NetInstall is a bit difficult as it uses a cut down version of OS X to do the install. The protocol is not too complex and you can hack something together with bootp and afp but you need the proprietary bits to make it work. This is only really useful once you get to the scale that you realise that OS X server doesn't scale well in very large network environments.

Finally #3 is really really easy.... Squid works wonders as a transparent proxy. Not only do you get the advantage of caching the updates, but you don't actually have to configure the machine to use it. Leaving it with vanilla settings really works well for mobile users as they can update at home, etc.

We used to use a transparent proxy at an apple shop I worked for, even though we had an OS X server. Since we had a lot of new machines in for servicing this would allow them to update from the proxy instead of the net. Not to mention MUCH MUCH MUCH faster.